Homebrew msp430 Development Board

While not exclusively devoted to AVR microcontrollers, this blog has concentrated on them for one simple reason: they are very easy to get started with. Whether for beginner (Arduino) or professional (GNU make and gcc), the software ecosystem is very mature. Furthermore, a proliferation of cheap Arduinos (and clones) means that even lack of hardware experience is no barrier to entry.

Texas Instruments has been relatively late to the party with their launchpad line of msp430-based microcontrollers and, until quite recently, a steep learning curve awaited the newcomer. That has all changed with the creation of an Arduino-compatible core for the msp430 and a fork of the Arduino software, Energia, which provides an experience almost indistinguishable from Arduino itself.

msp430 'launchpad' experimenter board

One further thing missing, until now, was ease of prototyping with the microcontrollers themselves outside of the launchpad development kits. The latter actually contain two microcontrollers, one to act as a usb programmer and the other to run user-programs. (While the first actually provides more features than that, that's all a beginner sees.) Thus a hobbyist wanting to use an msp430 for a real-world application had two choices: use the launchpad experimented board itself 'in the field', or program the microcontroller in the experimenter board and then move the newly programmed chip to its permanent home by hand. Easy field upgrades of firmware would require a more complex solution.

Such a solution has been in the works by members of the 43oh community for about a year now. This is a combined USB-stack (cf., v-usb) and bootloader which allows uploading of user programs via a simple USB cable. Only three resistors are required to support USB.

My hardware instantiation of this work (done entirely by others at 43oh and downloadable here) looks like this:

boot430 development board (with g2553)

The bootloader itself is bootstrapped using a development  board: I programmed all of my msp430s at one sitting! Once bootstrapped, user programs can be updated with a simple USB cable and a program called boot430.

Stripboard Layout

The final piece of the puzzle was programming one of these from Energia. Conventionally Energia uses an external program, mspdebug which unfortunately does not speak the same protocol as the USB bootloader. While it is unfortunately not currently possible to configure Energia to use a different uploader, this is a problem which the Arduino team has already encountered and solved in its still-beta version-1.5.

Thus, my somewhat-heretical solution to this problem (at Github): port the Energia launchpad cores back to Arduino, using the same software infrastructure as for the ATtiny development board described earlier. This seems to work quite well, although Arduino has still-unresolved issues in the area of libraries, which leads to confusion about which libraries are actually available on the current platform.